Posted
by
pudgeon Thursday June 03, 2004 @12:34AM
from the yes-please dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Toshiba today announced that it will offer a 60GB version of its 1.8-inch hard drive in the coming months and that Apple has already placed its order. Cindy Lee, deputy manager of Toshiba's hard disk drive division, said the drive will enter mass production during July or August. All three iPod models (15GB, 20GB, and 40GB) use Toshiba drives, while the iPod mini uses a 4GB 1-inch drive from Hitachi. Lee noted that Toshiba is currently shipping 350,000 of the 1.8-inch drives per month to Apple."

I have almost 10 GB of music on my pc. I only listen to about 50 of them on a regualr basis. Does anyone really need 60 GB of music. Yes it can be used for backup purposes. But dedicated backup external hard drives at a higher storage capacity are cheaper than this.

Because you hopefully have better things to do than to rerip your whole CD collection for an improvement so small you can't possibly notice it while listenting through consumer headphones with your computer on in the background?

But I shouldn't talk. I'm actually considering the same thing since I don't have anything better to do:)

So you only listen to 50 songs on a regular basis. Wouldn't it be cool if you had every song you'd ever owned available on the fly? When you know precisely the right song for this exact mood, and it's right there, that's pretty awesome.

Do you need it? Of course not. You don't really need any of this. It's entertainment. You need your insulin shots, or your defibrillator.

Some people really, really, really like to have all their music with them all the time. (Not me. I don't listen to music. But I have many friends who do.) It only takes a few hundred thousand of 'em to make it worthwhile for Apple to make this.

I disagree. Through the millenia that humans have been around the diagnosis and treatment for diabetes is fairly new. From a biological stand point when you get something like diabetes, it's time for you to check out and no longer contribute to the gene pool, but we've evolved to make it so that isn't a problem.

Music on the other hand, has been around longer than medicine. It could be considered entertainment, but it's a very important facet of human life. Almost everyone listens to music in one form o

Look folks, it's simple enough. "Alot" is NOT A WORD. You mean "a lot". That's TWO WORDS. Repeat after me - "alot" is not a word, it is a lazy mistake. "allllllllot" is not a word, it is a symptom of really believing, wrongly, that "alot" is a word and proceeding to spell it without using the space bar.

Can we at least try to spell things the right way? Let's have some coherent discourse, and leave the typos at home.

loose is the opposite of "tight". It is not the same word as "lose".

lose is the opposite of "win". It is not the same word as "loose".

alot is not a word. You either meant "a lot" (many of) or "allot" (allocate).

embiggen is not a word, not even a perfectly cromulent word. Homer Simpson made it up.

irregardless is not a word, it's an word that idiots use because they think it makes them look clever. "regardless" would be fine. "irrespective" would be fine. But no, you have to show the world what an idiot you are.

virii is not a word. It is not slang. It is not jargon. It is WRONG. It is wrong in every possible way. It's not English, it's not Latin, it's not understood by anybody with an education, it's not understood by anyone except people who already know it's wrong. It is not going to be adopted any time soon. Stop using it.

Show the world you care about good communication. Fucking learn to communicate coherently. Classical music my fucking arse, you can't even spell.

In spite of your errant pedantry, some of your points are plainly wrong.

irregadless is most definitely a word. The OED, Webster's, and the American Heritage Dictionary all contain it as a listed item. (While all "words" are not necessarily listed, all listed items are necessarily words.) It's got nearly a century of documented history. Its usage may be discouraged, but it is nevertheless a word.

virii actually IS a word, however sad this fact may be. Its use is restricted to very specific groups, which qualifies it as part of a specific linguistic register (sort of like a dialect within a social subgroup of a population). So, "virii" is the plural of "virus" in and only in the context of computer viruses being discussed by the sorts of people who think writing them is a good way to spend an afternoon and their ilk. (You may find the discussion of plurals of virus in English & Latin to be found here [linguistlist.org] of some interest. But these facts about what ought to be the correct plural according to English & Latin morphological rules do not discount the fact that "virii" entered one register of the English language via a route that "smacks of pseudo-pedantry.")

And, saddest of all, though this day has not yet come, alot will one day be a grammatical word in the English langauge. Words like "altogether", "instead", "nonetheless", "amiss", "already", and "alright" (the last of which is still in the process of gaining acceptance), all attest to the process by which words that frequently collocate coalesce into new words. Thankfully, we'll probably all be dead before "alot" becomes kosher in formal writing.

A not-unreasonable collection of CDs compressed with FLAC would be pressing the limits of a 60 Gb drive. When you consider lossless audio (or near-lossless like high-kbps mp3/aac), the large drive sizes are quite reasonable. If you only listen to 128kbps pop singles, fine by me, but don't go around raining on other people's parades. If you don't need it, don't buy it, and market pressures will adjust production accordingly

I own and have ripped nearly three hundred CDs and have about 400 more on MP3 alone. This is after selling the ones that I don't like, which isn't many.

I listen to all of them. Maybe not all of them on a regular basis, but I can't think of one that I'd be willing to say "I'm OK not listening to that ever again"

It's nice having a big chunk of that library be able to travel around with me.

While I'm certainly not everyone, there are people out there with even more than me. Just because most people are fine with a few hundred favorite songs, or a few dozen favorite albums, doesn't mean everyone is.

Also, how many 60 GB external harddrives let you play music? There may be more economical solutions out there, but the ipod is more likely to be in your pocket when you need it, and the two birds with one stone factor is pretty big for some people.

The iPod's most serious drawback is its battery life. The biggest power drain on the iPod is when it spins up the HD to load new files. Encoding all your music into a lossless format will cause it to access the HD multiple times for each song, in most cases.

Therefore filling your ipod with losslessly encoded files and then playing them will flatten the battery at a very fast pace indeed.

The best use of 60gig iPod drive is to use it to store other large files - avi files for example...

Right, but none of the existing 60 GB players use 1.8" hard drives, because until now there weren't any. Have you seen one of those Nomad players next to an iPod [ziffdavisinternet.com]? "Chunky" is a good word to use.

Will this new iPod have any other features? I picked up an iRiver iHP 120 [amazon.com] last month for a good $50 (Canadian) less than the similar-capacity iPod, and the iRiver has optical in/out, direct encoding to MP3 or WAV, OGG Vorbis support, USB 2.0, and an FM tuner.

Does Apple have any plans to beef up their offerings, or are they counting on consumers to keep paying for the iPod's hipster image?

The problem with the iRiver iHP 1x0 players is that they lack DRM. I'm currently leaning toward an iPod because of this. Most of my use will be for music I rip from CD, but I would like the option of buying the occasional single track from one of the online stores, when I don't like enough on an album to justify buying a CD.

What exactly is stupid about it? Players with DRM, such as the iPod, and the Creative players, can play files without DRM. Players without DRM, on the other hand, cannot play files with DRM (without hacking or kludging).

Apple more narrowly designs their products for a variety of reasons. Most people don't have any need for a portable encoding mp3 jukebox with optical IO as the world is mostly made up of non-geeks. Also remember that the iPod is almost a direct conduit to the iTMS (which we still don't have in Canada). So incorporating an FM tuner and on board encoding isn't in their best interest.

As for the "hipster image", well, that's marketing and it's how they sell iPods. Most slashdotters may see it as disappointing that successful products aren't sold on specs. But the dominant group of consumers don't care. They'd much rather have something that's well culturally regarded ("hip") that they can figure out and utilize without too much effort. This is what Apple does and that's why they're so successful with this product. Also be glad that you can get what you want in the iHP 120. But it's unreasonable to expect Apple to market directly to a niche like geeks with the iPod.

The price of small-factor drives on the retail market have such a markup that their are actually some music players out there that have a street price lower than the street price of the drive that they contain inside... this is possible because the device-makers are buying the drives on the wholesale market in bulk rather than one at a time.

But it brings up an interesting point... right now there are far more digital music players out there on the market than there are makers of small-factor HDs.

My music collection is about 1500 CDs... I ripped them to AIFFs in iTunes and compress to other formats as necessary, as codecs (esp. Lame and Quicktime) improve (I use iTunes-Lame [blacktree.com] for MP3 compression). This translates to about 160 GB of 160 Kbps AACs. So this is big news for me - I'll be able to fit everything on 3 iPods instead of 4.

I'll be really psyched when 80 GBs are available, and then (dream dream) it'll take a 160 GB iPod to make me really, really happy.

This might not seem like a big deal, but when I'm travelling, especially when I'm flying my Cherokee 180-D across country, I won't be able to anticipate what I'll really want to listen to - and I invariably want to hear something that I didn't bring along.

And if you think iPods are expensive, you should price avionics on an airplane. Or really just about anything on an airplane.

Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car. Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless [apple.com]? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.

Wait a minute - you have 1500 CDs ripped as AIFFs? You have more invested in hard drives than I do in my car.

Well, with all due respect you don't have a very pricy car then - you'll probably spend more on gas this year. It takes about 900 GB, which costs about $1000, or about $.66 per CD. Worth it, I think, for being able to be totally random access in bulk.

I also keep another 900 GB offline in a storage unit as a backup. I do not want to have to rerip. So that's a surcharge of $1.33 per CD, which means that my music infrastructure is done. I never have to worry about it again, modulo replacing harddrives and reencoding to new codecs, at least until 5.1/SACD/DVD-Audio/Whatever mature as audio formats with the whole software ecology around them evolving.

Why don't you encode all those AIFFs into Apple Lossless? You'll drop file sizes 40-50% and still be able to losslessly transcode into whatever without having to rerip.

It's tempting, but I don't like that I'd have to use an Apple closed source tool to access the data. Right now, I can convert my AIFFs on any system with a C compiler and a firewire port, so it's safer format. That decision will change if I can ever get source for something that will decode ALE back to WAV of AIFF.

Similarly, I don't use the other lossless encoders because they're not supported in iTunes/iPod, my preferred music playback platforms.

With that amount of music why don't you just put a computer in your plane? Won't have to worry about harddrive space then.

Funny you should ask...

That would be very cool, but FAA rules are kind of strange about this sort of thing. If a device is defined to be portable, it's the PIC's (Pilot In Command's) judgment as to whether it can be used in the cockpit safely without interfering with the airworthiness of the aircraft.

On the other hand, if it's a fixed installation, there's a ton of paperwork and bureacracy that has to be gone through in order to get FAA approval and navigating it correctly is neither quick nor cheap.

Worse than that, but as a mere pilot, I'm not authorized to do more than minor cosmetic and maintenance tasks on my airplane - I need somebody certified by the FAA to work on avionics in order to work on my panel. And they do not work cheap.

On top of all that, I do want to be able to take my music library with me in the car too, so portable is preferable to me anyway.

usually the pricing stays about the same and the size just goes up...... often the towers will dot he same thing.... Fast, Faster and Fastest will stay about the same price but the specs will jump up a step. not always true, but often is.

right now15gig = $29920 = $39940gig = $499

it would make sense if....20 gig = $29940gig = $39960gig = $499or something like that depending on what drives are available

though it depends on what kind of deal Apple get's on the drives..... Apple has said theyw ould like to lower the prices on the iPods as much as possible, but there is a set profit margin. as parts come down in price, so will retail prices. the iPod Mini follows another parts list and plan, and those drives are another manufacturer, so it's price has nothing much to do with this.

Something I've always wondered: just how resistant are these HDs to (physical) shocks? If you drop an iPod while it's reading from the disk, for example, will it still work or will you be left with a worthless chunk of metal and plastic? Portable devices tend to get a lot of wear and tear, so I'd tend to stay away from anything using such a seemingly fragile storage medium.

Granted the HD does not spin all the time. But I have had incidents where my iPod has been hurled on the floor at great velocity, and also driven along very bumpy roads with a sport suspension and the iPod playing the whole time - and this is the original 5GB model.

I think few things short of a sledge hammer are even going to make the iPod skip, much less harm the drive. I have yet to ever hear the iPod skip for any reason.

I did have a little less luck with a portable photo storage device that used an HD - I was jogging along with it in the lower pocket of my shorts bouncing against my leg while it was writing files from a CF card to the HD. In that case I did manage to get one bad sector on the drive, but that was pretty good considering the abuse it was going through (I wanted to see what extremes it could take for shock while operating). I don't know if that drive (standard laptop drive) was any differently speced than the iPod drive though.

Sure hope that this does not infringe on some Microsoft patent... They just might have a patent on "a mobile computing device with capacity greater than 50 gigabytes"... These days, you just never know.

With all of its other innovations (ie, the Macintosh), Apple sets itself up so that no one else can easily copy its unique design features. For example, MacOS has always had vastly better usability than anything else. It has taken years for MS Windows and KDE to catch up. That hasn't given Apple any kind of market dominance, but a lot of people still believe that if you buy a Mac, stuff just works and is easy and intuitive, and they're more right about that than with any other computer system type.

The iPod is a different thing. It's just a music player with some storage and a cool look. It's the kind of thing that can be designed fairly easily. It requires the iTunes service, but that's also something which any company can set up for not too much money. I guess it gives Apple some "cred" but it also sets Apple up to be priced out of the market when iPod-like things become commodities. Just wondering... Do any iPod users have thoughts on this?

---------WML porn [steamymobile.com] - you must have a WML-capable browser like Opera to click that link

Actually the iPod is pretty original... You have to see one side-by-side with any of the other players...they're a work of art. They also are more "hackable" than any of the others. They have their own OS, with a "community" of people writing PDA like apps for them... for most people it can replace getting a Palm too! Unlike all the other players trying desperately to lock you into THEIR service, Apple's lets you do lots of other non-music related stuff too...

I went to the Apple Store SF last week (it's more like a cathedral of Apple, really - a clean, white, well-lit cathedral to adore sleek designs... anyway).

They had some iPod minis coming in. Buying frenzy ensued, and the color ones (blue only) were sold out in half an hour. Imagine a 50% off sale of Hermes (or LV) bags in Japan - it was kind of like that.

This is a fashion phenomenon, like none has happened in technology before. People buy them because they are sexy, sleek, the thing to have - especially the minis.

So this is not just a piece of tech with a cool look. It's a cool look (if you want to put it that way) with a piece of tech. Therefore, the competition will fail - they don't get it. Of all tech companies, Sony is probably the only one which would be able to launch a successful competitor. But they haven't so far...

The iPod, especially the mini, is about one thing: Being the coolest person in the gym - or in any other social situation. And you don't get there with a Dell, a Creative XYZ or an Archos whatever.

The biggest danger to the iPod thing, therefore, is fashion itself. Fashion trends tend to be unstable and things that were cool last year tend to be not cool anymore this year. But i somehow think the iPod will be spared this fate - maybe the Design is too timeless for that to happen.

1. 60GB?!? Who would ever use that much space?2. 60GB?!? Thank god, I'm out of space on my 40GB.3. Does it support Ogg?4. Stop whining about Ogg!5. Apple rules!6. Apple sucks/is dying/is out of touch!7. Imagine a Beowulf cluster...8. The Nomad/Muvo/two cans and a stick are just as good or better.9. I, for one, welcome our excessive HD space Overlords10. In Soviet Russia 60GB iPods buy You!

You can buy hard drives with rebates for under $50 now. What's going on with the prices ?These microdrives are sexy but the cost $150-200 to manufacture. I don't mind carrying a slightly larger 20 gig model if it's priced right.

Do you realize how much power it takes to spin up a 3.5" drive? All external 3.5" USB drives need an AC adapter because a USB port can't provide enough power. Even a 5400RPM single platter drive can easily draw 10 watts constantly (mostly on the 12 volt rail). That means a 1250mAh battery (3G iPods have a 950mAh battery IIRC) could power just the drive (not including any MP3 decoding hardware) for about 90 minutes. Don't forget that because of their larger platters and heads, 3.5" drives are more vulnerable to bumps than their smaller laptop counterparts. So your idea for a cheap mp3 player would be great if you want a heavy, power-hungy mp3 player that will destory itself at the slightest jolt.

Sorry to shoot your idea down so harshly, but now you know the reason no one makes portable mp3 players with 3.5" drives.

Rumours of a truly next gen multimedia iPod have been circulating for some time now.
People asking who could possibly need 60GB for music storage (by the way, I can't fit all my music library on my 40GB model) are possibly missing the point of the need for greater storage capacity.
Sure, 60GB is a lot of 6MB music files, but it it's a whole lot fewer movie files.
Personally, I think a fully multimedia iPod would no longer be an iPod, but I'm sure that Apple would find it hard not to capitalise on its mega-brand if the potential market for such devices ever became widespread enough.

Microsoft's xPod will have 600 GB! It will go for 8 months on a single charge, and cost less than $50.

Hell, we may even give them away in cereal packets!

Please wait for it and don't go buying one of those silly white iPods. Our xPod will be black. Black is cool! It will run super-DRM, hyper-product activated music in the form of the industry standard (it's a STANDARD okay... or else) WMA, which is what everyone wants, in the sense of "here's where you're going today" kind of wants.

And no, there is no truth that WMA stands for "We May Ask for your first child." Who do you think we are, bloodsucking vampires or something. (Looks like we'll have to start using smaller print on the EULAs.)

Oh please please please wait for the Microsoft xPod. I wanna be just like you Steve. I've even started to wear turtlenecks and say "phenomenal" all the time... We wants it, the precious.

While I'm sure many people here would have no trouble filling a 60GB iPod, the real reason they're increasing the space so rapidly is their new feature Home-on-iPod. [appleinsider.com] This, coupled with home folder encryption, would allow for truly portable computing; just plug your iPod in and it's your Macintosh, with all your preferences set and all your libraries available. Sounds great to me!

Just a few reminders of what various slashdotters originally though of the iPod before "iPods are the shiznit" became/. canon.

"iPod is a good product, but nothing to get excited over." - harlows_monkeys

"It's not cool at all. It's just another Mac attempt to have the coolest looking, hippest sounding gadget on the market. It adds nothing serious to the current options. For instance, no Ogg Vorbis support (and yes, I realize it probably decodes mp3 in hardware, but...) and it doesn't appear to be cross-platform. I guess this falls into the Dilbert principle of "the best target market is stupid rich people." Since they'll fall for anything and have the money to burn on it." - ichimunki

"...the "rose-colored glasses that you will need for this to seem like a worthwhile product. What a let-down, geez!!" - david614

"People need to realize that all apple ever really delivers is mediocre equipment that, while it may look really cool, is less technically advanced/powerfull/whatever than competing products that cost 20-25% less." - greysky

"A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else. Agree with the article poster - Lame. Not only is this a lackluster MP3 unit (which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners), but it has virtually no UI wizardry that might define it as an Apple product. A total waste of time." - Ars-Fartsica

"I'd rather pay $100 for a Rio Volt. 700mb of songs per CD with an unlimited number of CD's, provided you change them. Yeah, this should compete favorably with the solid state units, but they've already lost to the CD-MP3 units, IMO." - Fred Ferrigno

"I think it'll sell as well as the G4 Cube. Oops.;-)" - jaoswald

"And I was all excited they were gooing to release a OS X based wireless web pad. Instead we get yet another portable MP3 player.. "groundbreaking" I think was the term I heard them use to describe this new secret product the other day. How "groundbreaking" can something be when I can walk up the street and buy something with similar (and in some cases, additional/better) features? Sigh. One day Apple will live up to the hype. OS X is cool, and their plastic molding team has skills, but the hardware just sucks." - nebby

"I am very sad that Apple seems to be repeating the same mistake they made with the Cube - great, nifty product that anyone would love to own, except that it's burdened by an unbelievably poor price/performance ratio." - jchristopher (Apple shareholder)

"...this was a VERY poor design decision. This could have been a $150 device if they'd used a regular laptop drive." - jchristopher again

Insightful indeed. As long as the form factor remains =, then all increases in capacity are inherently good. Even if you're one of those "I simply don't NEED more space" surrender monkeys, you could at least use the space to save backups of all your vital files so, should your house burn while you're out biking around you'll have a remote backup that survives.

you could at least use the space to save backups of all your vital files so, should your house burn while you're out biking around you'll have a remote backup that survives.

While I had thought about this, I realized that my iPod is also the bit of storage that I own most likely to be stolen. Having my critical files (i.e. financial records, tax returns, address books, etc.) on a device that has a (relatively) high likelyhood of being lost or stolen seems like a very bad idea.

While I had thought about this, I realized that my iPod is also the bit of storage that I own most likely to be stolen. Having my critical files (i.e. financial records, tax returns, address books, etc.) on a device that has a (relatively) high likelihood of being lost or stolen seems like a very bad idea.

On second thought, of course, you could always encrypt everything that you store there, but that's a more complex backup system and one that I'd bet a lot of people aren't as likely to keep up with...

But yeah, encryption is an option, dare I say a necessity, if you want to use your iPod for backup.

So, basically, in your/Users directory, for every person with FileVault turned on, there are two things.- A link of some kind to/Volumes/.com.apple.FileVault/username- A directory called.username

In the directory called.username is an encrypted sparse disk image called 'username.sparseimage'. If you copy it before it is mounted (say during boot) or as another user, you are guaranteed to get a good snapshot of your home directory. If you copy it while it's mounted, you may or may not get something usable.

Yeah, jeez. My CD collection takes up about 60GB, plus there's other stuff. My 30GB really isn't big enough. Now, in part this is because I use higher quality MP3s, so I can play them on my home stereo, and I really wish iTunes would optionally downsample tracks when it moves them to the iPod. Regardless... 60GB would be just about right.

And what was that someone said about not storing the MP3s on the player, where they could get lost? Hello, you have them on both. And actually, my home HD busted recently, and the only MP3s I didn't lose were the 30GB of music on my iPod. Next time, I'll back them all up, so I don't need to rerip.

I have about 3 gigs free right now (not COMPLETELY full, but close). Bear in mind, my music collection continues to grow, and I have stuff from my office that would be nice to have another backup in my pocket... just in case.

So absurd? probably. But if i didn't have an iPod and was given a choice between a 20,40, and 60... i might still jump for the 60. Always better to have room to grow.

I'd guess he's not encrypting them because they're family photos, but just because he encrypts all his backup data. I do the same, just on general principles--it may be overkill, but better overkill than underkill, no?

As the Cypherpunks like to point out, encryption is less useful if only the stuff you want to hide gets encrypted. knowing that 500k is the stuff I need to decrypt makes my life easier than trying to decrypt 3GB of stuff. Plus, the existance of JPEGs likely makes decrypting orders of magnatude worse, since about 90% of the data will effectively decrypt to random data; how do you know you're successful?

first, there are a lot of people with more than 40 gigs of music.... second, the iPod is also a firewire drive. it can be used for transporting large files (graphics, audio, video, whatever). it is also possible to boot off of OS X installed on the iPod, so you can dump your whole HD on there. The early lists of 10.3 features mentioned a feature called "home on iPod" that later vanished. it seemed you could copy/sync your whole home dir onto your ipod and login to it from any OS X running Mac. if that's really coming, the more space for music AND home dir, the better.

Yes & No about plugging it into someone else's box. It depends on what the ipod is formatted & what the box recognizes. Ipods can be formatted to vfat (windows versions) or hfs+ (mac versions). It can also be reformatted, but it's just a firewire/usb hard drive to a computer. Of course, the filesystem on that hard drive does matter a bit if you want to get useful data off of it.

Not everyone uses iPods strictly for music. I remeber reading several articles about how the guys filming the LOTR trilogy used iPods to transport video footage shot in the field to their editing stations offsite. They work just like a HD, at least on OSX. So having 60GB of storage especially for video or possibly high-end digital cameras or even audio would be very useful, especially since it can be a multi-use device.

My understanding is they were making footage in New Zealand and Peter Jackson was in London organising the score, Jackson had to see what they were doing and make suggestions the only fast pipe they had was some distance from where Jackson was working/staying at The Dorchester so they downloaded to ipods and then carried them to Jackson's hotel.

Nearly lost a late cut of the film in a mugging as well if the DVD is to be believed.

Heck, yeah. If I had an iPod, I'd be all over this media reader [drbott.com]. It's a bit bulky, but you can download photos to it, then when you sync up with iPhoto once you get back to your computer, it keeps the shots in the "rolls" you shot them in. Nice.

A larger capacity drive doesn't cost any more to make, so they might as well keep up with technology and keep the product line fresh. Ever notice that you can't buy a 10G drive anymore? Drive space goes for about $0.50 / gig, and that would only work out to $5 which is not doable. If apples doesn't offer a 60gig drive just because it's pointless, the other guy will because it doesn't cost them much extra.

Maybe Apple will also join the video bandwagon as they step up to the bigger drives?

I can;t even fill my 30Gb Nomad. What the hell are you going to do with 60Gb?

It's amazing how narrowly people seem to need to define the iPod. And I'm surprised that so many slashdotters can't seem to see past the "iPod == music player" shortsightedness.

iPod is a great music player, but it's also a great way to carry around a LOT of data of any kind.

iPod is also a hardware platform. That fact is emphasized by Apple's recent reorganization into a Macintosh group and an iPod group. At the moment it seems to be a relatively closed platform, but it has a processor, plenty of memory, a big disk, power, and I/O. It remains to be seen how Apple will use that platform, and when, but it's a pretty good guess that they'll do something interesting with it.

Eversince the first iPods came out, thieves have used them to connect to store display Macs so they can drag & drop software to it. Most commonly, Microsoft Office v.X. and Adobe Creative Suite products.

In the past, Apple has negotiated "exclusives" on certain high-demand-although-merely-incremental technologies. A good example would be the Cinema display when it first came out - for at least a year it was the only decent hires (>= 1600x1024) panel you could buy.

It wouldn't surprise me if we see the same thing with higher capacity mini-HDs. Apple's surely willing to pay some premium to be the only ones who can ship a 60G mp3 player.

Just because a linux kernel can read UFS doesn't mean it's GPL'd. Almost any unix including commercial ones like Solaris can use UFS. In fact it is the default filesystem used by Solaris. Nowhere does Sun distribute the source to their UFS implementation.

Not wanting to reply to trolls but just in case anyone actually believes this crap, UFS the filesystem used by BSD systems. If Apple are indeed using this filesystem for the iPod (and it is included in OSX), I'm sure they would be using one of the many BSD implementations and wouldnt bother ripping off a GPL one illegally.....

UFS stands for UNIX file system, which was originally developed from the first versions of UNIX at AT&T. The file system reached its current status in the 4.x BSD distributions. It it currently used in FreeBSD, NetBSD as well as OpenBSD and the Solaris Operating Environment. Linux support is available, but is not standard.

Now, take a deep breath and repeat after me. Not all that is open source is GPL.

No, in fact it's well-known that the iPod is using HFS+. It was a big issue when the iPod first came out, because Linux users were hoping to use it, and Linux has HFS support (but not HFS+).

As for the Windows version of the iPod, I would imagine it's using FAT32, but I don't know that. I find it highly unlikely that Apple would write a UFS filesystem driver for Windows, just for their iPod.

What we don't know is that the file system that the iPod uses is UFS, a file system that Linux can read. How did I discover this? I removed the hard drive out of my iPod, hooked it up to my IDE controller, and typed

mount -t ufs/dev/hdb/mnt

here's a fantastic idea,instead of removing the hdd from your ipod and potentially voiding your warranty say y or m to;"CONFIG_SCSI", "CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD", "CONFIG_IEEE1394", "CONFIG_IEEE1394_SBP2"reboot with your new kernel (or modprobe the modules) connect your ipod and mount as you did before (except it will appear as a scsi disk)

at LAME 3.96 --alt-preset standard (average ~200kbps for perceptually transparent music), I can get roughly 300 CDs onto about 15 GB, so about 1200 CDs is your answer I guess. That's a lot, but not unheard of.

It's legal to, you know, shift the format from CD to ogg/mp3. So I took my entire CD collection (~350 CDs) and ripped them to shiny, high-quality ogg files. All legally. No more scratches, no more blips, no more hunting for disc. I'm listening to them right now, in fact.

Maybe, maybe not. They might just bump the sizes up a bit, and keep the same price for the "small", "medium" and "large" models (has happened before). You would have to pay as much to get an iPod, but less $/GB. The question then is just what the three models will be (I don't think they ever have sold more than three models at a time).Either way, they'll surely drop one of the models when adding a new one, and probably the smallest one (15), which whould leave 20, 40 and 60. Or, they could go 20, 30, 60. We

The Neuros beats the Karma in a lot of ways. I know this because I have a Neuros and my brother has a Karma. The Neuros can record from line-in (also has a cheap built-in mic which works for recording lectures) to either MP3 or WAV. It can also broadcast over FM radio (which is great for the car / anywhere someone has a radio but no decent music). It works as a normal HD (USB2 now even). The backpack system rocks too: A new 40G USB2 backpack will be running me $260 instead of $330 for a new player (I sort of dropped my 20G backpack one too many times...). With my now dead 20G backpack (gah, making fun of hardcore kids skanking and getting beat up at a death metal show is NOT a smart thing to do with an mp3 player in your hand) the battery backpack has become a lifesaver; even though I can only fit two or three albums on the 128M of flash (the new Neuros II due out in about two weeks has 256M of flash and looks cooler) it's still a lot nicer to carry the Neuros around than my two CD binders (270 discs now... that's too many to carry around safely).

The Karma, on the other hand, has better playlist management and a much better equalizer (parametric eqs are fun...but only if you know what you are doing). The visualizations are nice and all but are basically just useless (and battery draining) eye candy. I'd gladly take a Neuros over a Karma any day. If the Neuros would release 1.8" drive based backpacks...the iPod would be dead in a minute. Size is the only thing holding it back now that Firmware 2.x supports all of the things people have been asking for since the beginning.

And if you're looking for just a portable hard drive, you can always get a USB2 backpack from the Neuros store [neurosaudio.com], a power adaptor, and a USB2 cable...all for around $300 total for a portable HD (the USB2 packpacks can operate as standalone hard drives without the head) that can operate on its built in battery for a while (which is great for quick transfers; at USB2 speed I've found that I can copy the entire drive in around 15 minutes and without needed the power cable at all). If you get the urge to listen to music it's only $100 more to get a head for your backpack.

And think about the guy who has 160G of music. Just grab a few 40G backpacks and swap between them; much cheaper than getting the same number of Karmas or iPods. 60G backpacks are supposed to be released sometime soonish too (and 1.8" HD backpacks...in December; they may or may not meet it...but the Neuros II is at least confirmed as shipping June 10 because several resellers have been preselling it).